


Butting Heads and Other Ways of Flirting

by resperella



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 04:58:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3556925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/resperella/pseuds/resperella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A diplomatic mission gone wrong forces Han and Leia to put up with each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Butting Heads and Other Ways of Flirting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greeneyedharpy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greeneyedharpy/gifts).



> Prompt: 2. Han/Leia pre-tESB. Sparks fly, everyone can see what’s happening but them, even the bad guys.

The lenses of her macrobinoculars are grimy and smudged, a new film of grease and dust sticking to them as fast as she can wipe them off. Crouching behind the skeleton of an ancient landspeeder, Leia squints through the blur at the trash pile in front of her, a jumble of rusting equipment punctuated by plumes of corrosive gas, with a watchtower about a kilometer away spearing up through the debris. Her contacts claimed that they’d set the security cameras in this area to a recorded loop, but that won’t fool the very human watchman pacing the rim of the tower. 

“Are we just supposed to run when he goes around the other side?” 

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Han rocks back on his heels, waving the binoculars off when she offers them to him. “This kind of backwater’s where the dregs of the Academy come to rot.” 

“That’s a bit rich, coming from – ” but Winter cuts her off with a pointed look, nodding her chin at the guard just turning away to walk his circuit around the tower. 

“Captain Solo’s right. If he keeps up this pace, we’ll be out of sight for at least a minute.” That’s Deev, one of Winter’s two agents from Supply and Procurement. “We’ll go as soon as he’s looking away.” The other agent, Sarran, doesn’t seem to be much of a talking type; he nods slowly and busies himself double-checking his blaster.

Han smirks at her, arrogance oozing from his pores, and Leia jams the binoculars back into her belt with a glare, suppressing the urge to push him face-first into the iridescent slick of oil next to his boot. 

“Awww, did you miss me, Princess?”

“Hardly.” She thinks wistfully of the handful of missions that preceded this one, and the quietly professional teams from Alliance security that had kept her safe while Han was under cover with Renegade Squadron. Not the most inspiring of conversationalists, but she couldn’t recall a single one of them ever making her wish that diplomatic immunity extended to manslaughter. 

Not that this planet would be particularly pleasant even without him, she reflects, as a gust of hot wind blows another stinging spray of gas into her face. The contacts they’re meeting are supposedly below all of this, huddled in a network of tunnels branching off the mining operation’s sewer system. A tiny gang of Rebel sympathizers calling themselves the Underground, on a planet stripped to its bare crust by Imperial Mining and Manufacturing, claiming to be in possession of stolen Durelium stores that the Alliance desperately needs to keep snubfighter production up to the bare minimum level.

It’s her job to tip them over from sympathizers to allies, to convince them that the Alliance is worth giving up the profits of selling their stolen ore to smuggling groups, worth a death sentence for treason if they’re ever caught. And then, if all goes well, it’s up to Winter and her team to actually pack up the ore, and Han and the Falcon to sneak it off the planet. 

The guard’s back disappears around the tower. Winter ducks out from behind their covering hill, and Leia scuttles out behind her, her heavy pack dragging at her shoulders. They’re all loaded down with mining and purification equipment that the Alliance is trying to trade for the Underground’s ore, to spare their precious cash if they possibly can. 

They pull up under cover of a twisted sheet of plasteel: Winter squats down to look at the ground for the handle of the trapdoor, but before she gets very far, it opens on its own and out pokes a face hidden by a mask and hood. 

“Tarric?” Leia guesses.

He nods and beckons them down the shaft. 

When the door bangs shut above them, Tarric pulls off his helmet, revealing gray skin and straggling clumps of black-brown hair pulled back into a ratty ponytail at the base of his neck. His body is completely covered in a jumpsuit despite the stifling, airless heat of the tunnel.

“Princess.” He holds out one gloved hand to shake hers, smiling around two prominent canine teeth. “We’ll have to get you helmets for the trip back; the acid fog is dangerous.” 

“Thank you.” 

The walls of the tunnel are crumbling duracrete, lined with pipes and studded with obviously scavenged emergency lights in mismatched shades of off-white, held up by tape and makeshift wiring. Lines of spraypaint give directions in some language Leia doesn’t recognize. They follow Tarric through the maze, occasionally leaving the tunnels to climb down shaky metal ladders in chutes so small Leia’s pack scrapes against the opposite wall. 

“I appreciate your willingness to meet with us personally, Princess,” Tarric says, bringing one hand under her elbow to help her over a particularly uneven section of tunnel without tipping over under her pack. It’s unnecessary, but it’s the kind of courtesy she’s learned to appreciate more and more since leaving the Imperial Court for a life of scrambling around from one half-furnished Alliance base to the next. 

She thanks him with a nod and a diplomatic smile. “I hope Councilmember Simmin will be reassured of our commitment.” Simmin had been particularly insistent on her attendance, dubious that the Alliance was actually committed to mutual support – a reasonable concern, but the man had been graceless to the point of rudeness about it. 

“Excuse me,” Han bulls in from behind them. “As the Princess’ personal security expert, I think it would be safest if she walked with me.” His face twists into a faux-rueful smile, and he tugs backward on Leia’s arm.

“Perhaps,” Leia says to Tarric, shooting Han a cut-it-out glare over her shoulder and leaning forward against his pull, “you would find it interesting to discuss the specifics of the mining equipment we’ve brought. I recall that you had some technical questions; I’m sure Deev would be happy to explain.”

“Of course.” He gives Han an undeniably patronizing look, and Leia decides that she likes him. “It’s comforting to see such careful attention to your safety, Princess.”

Deev – always eager to talk shop – shoulders his way up to the front as Han and Leia drop back.

“Personal security expert?” she hisses at him, but Han jerks his chin over to the side and she sees what she’d been too distracted to notice: the familiar cylindrical shape of an Imperial recording wand. Han’s face is blank, but his fingers are straying close to his blaster. 

“Winter,” Leia calls, “Do you have my spare comlink?” It’s a code they’d worked out long ago, as girls on Alderaan, and with Winter, there’s not even the slightest doubt about whether or not she’ll remember it. 

“I think so.” Winter nods to Deev and drops back. “Let me see…” she rummages in her belt with one hand while she tracks Leia’s eyes to the recording wand and her mouth flattens out into a hard line. 

Abruptly, a muffled crash from above them relieves them of any need for verbal subtlety at all. 

Tarric startles, but after a second of listening, it’s obvious. Thump-thump-thump-boom: one of the glowpanels flashes and sparks, and dust rattles down from the ceiling. An Imperial strike team assault: it’s a rhythm she’s heard a hundred times, deep in the heart of a ship or with her fingers frantically scattering over a keyboard trying to erase the last of the computer’s memory before the front guard gets there. 

And now she’s apparently brought it down on a community full of innocents – that is, if they are innocent. Han is already swinging his blaster up to point at Tarric’s chest, but before anyone can speak, the tunnel wall explodes fifty meters ahead of them, flashes of white armor and red bullets in a haze of dust and rocks – Tarric screams and falls to the floor in the spastic strobe-flash, and Winter is yanking her sideways down an even more cramped set of stairs, so tiny they have to follow single-file. 

Leia’s pack crushes her forward; she staggers over her own feet trying to keep her heels on the backs of the steps. They hit flat ground, and Winter stops, suddenly - Han staggers into her, and she hears a grunt from behind him as Sarran bumps into him. 

Hands at her hips, and then Han’s chest pushes away from her back. 

“Winter?”

“I have to pick the lock.” The click of metal-on-metal is barely audible above the thumping from above them. 

Han’s fingers are still resting on her hips, his thumbs tucked into her utility belt – Leia reaches around and slaps him off with a glare that’s wasted in the darkness. 

The door clicks open and Winter’s dragging them through, but the shock troops have been catching up in the meantime; the blaster fire is louder, splashes of red appearing at angles around corners in the tunnel. 

They barrel into the stem of a T-intersection in a cloud of dust and the flare of an exploding glowpanel. Winter is shouting through the noise, pointing at the left leg of the intersecting passage, but another spray of laser fire interrupts her, and Leia ducks to the right in an instinctual rush for the closest cover – into a narrow tunnel without lighting, the walls fading out into pitch blackness after a few meters. 

Across from her, Winter is trying to tell her something, but she can’t hear it over the gunshots. A peek around the corner shows Sarran’s body lying too-still on the floor, shock troopers edging around the corners – Han is laying down some kind of suppression pattern, and she raises her own blaster to join in. But why aren’t they moving? 

“Just go,” Leia screams across the hall, flapping her hands at them. They all have comlinks; she can lose any Imperials who come after her and get back to Winter when the assault troops are gone. But she can’t very well do it while she’s still laying down covering fire for the rest of them. 

Winter yells something else; she’s trying to use the Alliance’s hand signals, but Han keeps pushing her behind him to take shots. 

Leia’s firing pattern sends another trooper clattering to the floor in a broken pile of armor, but in the temporary reprieve while his squadmates pull his body out of the way, Han is shouting something at Winter and charging across the hallway to get to her.

“What are you doing?” She squeezes two more shots around the corner, jerking her head back as near-miss laser bolts send chips of rock flying around her face. 

“There’s no exit that way,” he screams into her ear, “you can’t get out.” 

He leans around the corner, his face screwed up at the flaring light, and fires a few more times, but the troopers are getting braver, setting up some kind of riot shield that protects them from the pitiful amount of covering fire their quarry can lay down.

“So you trapped yourself here with me. Wonderful plan!” She ducks under his arm to add her own contribution to their cover.

“Save it, Sweetheart.” Han sneaks another glance around, and waves at Winter, who starts shooting in earnest. He waves his hand in front of her face, with five fingers up, then four, then three – 

A small silver sphere rolls into the center of the intersection, one red indicator light blinking innocuously on its surface, and Leia shoves him across and crushes him into the opposite wall in the split second of stillness before the detonator explodes. 

The noise is so loud she can’t hear it, pressure building and bursting against her eardrums in waves of nauseating heat. She feels shrapnel cutting into the backs of her legs even through the thick mechanic’s jumpsuit, but it’s almost abstract, the way pain would feel in a dream.

Someone is shoving at her – Han, shouting something she can’t hear through the buzzy ringing noise and pushing her along the passage. Chips of rock fly off the walls; she stumbles on the uneven floor and nearly falls into him, only the pull at her wrist keeping her staggering forward. 

There’s a vibration under her boots, knocking her sideways into Han and sending both of them reeling into the wall: dirt and pebbles shower down around her shoulders, and dust clogs in her mouth. The air is too thick to breathe; grit coats her tongue and sticks in her nose, and the ground keeps shaking. Han crushes into her, pushing her down onto the floor with his body sprawled out over hers, and she’s too dazed to do anything but lie there coughing into the grit while the tunnel shudders around them. 

Then there’s silence, muffled by the high whine in her ears, and everything goes preternaturally still. 

Han’s weight lifts off her back, and a glowrod flickers somewhere above her. 

“Leia?” He’s right there, but his voice is coming from so far away. “Talk to me, Princess.” His fingers wave around in front of her eyes. 

“Stop that,” she says, too-loud but her voice echoes tinnily in her own ears, and when she tries to bat his fingers away her hand slaps through empty air a foot to the side.

“Dammit,” Han mutters, and suddenly the glowrod is right in her face, fingers pressing around her hairline. 

She opens her mouth, struggling woozily until she’s half-sitting up on her elbows, but Winter’s voice cuts her off: “Captain Solo? Leia?” 

“Over here.” Han’s hands under her armpits pull her mostly-upright against the wall of the tunnel, and push a canteen into her hands. “Her Royal Rebelliousness got all self-sacrificing over the detonator.” 

It takes both hands to get the canteen to her mouth, and the water is lukewarm but at least it’s clean: Leia swishes the first mouthful around and spits it out to get the worst of the dust out of her mouth. The tunnel is coming back into focus, her body starting to feel like it’s attached to her again. A pile of rubble fills the space where the intersection used to be, a haze of metallic dust still hanging in the air. The glowpanels are flickering even more erratically than before, and a few of them are completely destroyed: the floor of the tunnel is full of broken panes of transparisteel and loose wires hang off the walls. 

“They must have had someone on the inside.” Leia’s head aches, thoughts lumbering slowly through the haze. “An Imperial spy, or a mole…” She looks down the non-collapsed end of the tunnel, which disappears into the same rough-cut stone and flickering lights. 

“And we took the bait,” Winter finishes for her.

“I knew I didn’t like that Tarric guy,” Han grumbles. More likely Simmin, she thinks and if she were feeling even a little bit less dazed she’d point out that Han’s bizarre jealousy issues are not actually the infallible guide to moral character that he seems to think they are, but she’s not sure she can come up with that many words in a row, so she sits back and takes another tiny sip of water. 

“Winter?” That’s Deev: he staggers over and collapses down next to them, obviously favoring one knee. “The whole tunnel collapsed?”

Winter nods. 

Leia rubs the back of her neck, and her hand comes away bloody. “Is there a way out?”

Winter’s eyes go distant as she rifles back through her perfect memory. “There should be another exit, if it hasn’t collapsed, too. About an hour, maybe, if nobody gets injured on the way. Once we’re there, we should be close enough to the surface for the call beacon to work.” She shucks the pack off her shoulders and starts rifling through it. “Deev, do you have – oh. Thank you, Captain Solo.”

Leia belatedly realizes that Han is pushing a can of disinfectant spray into her hands. “I just don’t want her getting all gangrenous on us, all right?” he snaps at Winter’s pleased surprise. “She’s temperamental enough when she’s not dying of staph.”

Leia rolls her eyes and immediately regrets it as pain flares through her head in response. She breathes through it and pretends it doesn’t take her three tries to aim the disinfectant at the right spot on her neck. 

“Need a hand with that, Your Worship?” 

“You could put it over your own mouth; that would help.”

Winter sighs. “If you’re better enough to snap at each other, you’re better enough to walk. Let’s get going.” 

**

Deev’s knee swells up painfully despite their best efforts at field medicine, and Leia’s still a little dazed: Winter’s initial estimate of one hours quickly grows to two. They’d make faster time without their packs, but the equipment too precious to leave – bad enough that the portable ionizer died with Sarran. Her pack protected most of her back from flying shrapnel back in the tunnel, but now it’s heavy enough to throw her halfway off-balance with every step, trickles of clammy sweat running down her back. 

Leia staggers doggedly along under the weight, her focus narrowed down to the toes of her boots on the tunnel floor. She tries to make a list of all the possible alternative sources of Durelium ore and cudgels her brain into remembering the Alliance’s latest budget projections looking for some way to make it work. Tries not to wonder whether Simmin had been the mole, or whether it had been Tarric all along and his kindness had been a façade that she fell for like a debutante straight out of etiquette school. 

She trips on her own feet, stumbling and scraping her palms on the wall. And then there are hands on her upper arms, and Han is pushing her down to sit on a protruding lump of sandy rock, unclipping the straps from around her shoulders. 

“Han – what – ”

“Sweetheart, you’re walking like you chased a bottle of Dodbri whiskey with a pair of death sticks, and your face looks like Hoth got nauseous – Winter?” The last word is louder, shouted down the hallway. 

Winter stops and frowns back at them. “She’s gonna pass out,” Han says, pulling the pack off her body.

“I am not.” Without the weight on her shoulders, the world feels unbalanced again, and she stares straight ahead to keep herself upright.

Winter tips her face up to look at her eyes, and frowns at whatever she sees there. “My pack is lighter; you can switch with me.”

Leia huffs, but Winter is talking in that eminently rational voice that always made Leia think Winter should have been the one born a princess. Reluctantly, Leia surrenders her own pack and buckles on Winter’s – it is lighter; Winter had all the drop cloths and tarps, which are bulky but don’t weigh much. 

She hauls herself up again before her legs can stiffen up, pointedly ignoring Han’s hand.

“Just trying to help,” he drawls.

“You can help by developing more common sense than an inbred gundark.” She settles the pack on her shoulders and starts off again. 

To her disappointment, Han decides to follow along. “Excuse me? I wasn’t the one who nearly marched straight into the wall because she was too damn stubborn to take off her pack.”

“Well I wasn’t the one who pointlessly charged out into covering fire from an entire Imperial assault squad.”

“I was trying,” he says incredulously, “to save your life. Are you really telling me that your precious Alliance Security types wouldn’t have done that?”

“They would have used the standard hand signals to bring me over while that trooper was down instead of showing off their deathwish – ”

“Showing off?” Han’s face scrunches up in disbelief. “What, for you? In your dreams, your Worship.”

“In my nightmares.”

Deev stops abruptly in front of her, and Leia nearly staggers into him, catching herself just in time to avoid crashing down onto his injured knee.

“Would you two mind?” he snaps. “If you want to torque each other’s hydrospanners...”

“Torque each other’s – ” Han cuts in incredulously, but Deev just talks louder. 

“– can it at least wait until you don’t have a captive audience?”

Leia takes a deep breath, and puts her diplomacy face on. “Of course. I’m sorry for disturbing you.” She looks back at her feet and permits herself a few moments of seething before she tries to remember where she was in her mental spreadsheets. At least the frustration is motivating, something to think about other than the ache in her head and the infuriating ringing buzz that whines in her ears when the conversation dies down.

Another hour of stony silence later, she feels the familiar sting of acidic smog on her face, and narrowly stops herself from laughing out loud with relief. 

Ahead of them, Winter stops. “Captain Solo, do you have the beacon?” Her voice is raspy with thirst, but they finished the last of their water long ago and even if there were a stream down here they probably wouldn’t want to drink from it. “This close to the surface, the signal should be able to get through.” 

“Right.” Han pulls out a black metal disc, flicking switches and frowning at the readout. “OK Chewie,” he mutters, “come get us outta here.” He shucks his pack and flops down to sit against the wall with a sigh: Leia pointedly waits until he’s done and deliberately makes a seat for herself on her own pack, trying to ignore the way her legs are shaking. 

**

Twenty minutes later, it’s sufficiently obvious that the beacon is refusing to start either transmitting their signal or receiving Chewie’s answering blink code. Fantastic. Han’s face is almost expressionless; his head is turned in the direction of the beacon, but he doesn’t look like he’s actually seeing it. 

“I thought this was supposed to be state-of-the-art technology.” It comes out more exhausted than biting. 

Han’s mouth flattens out and he rolls his eyes at her, but at least the blankness is gone. “It’s still better than that piece of junk Rieekan wanted me to use. That thing wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in this climate - hold this.” He hands a glowrod to Deev to supplement the stuttering panels on the walls, and prizes the case open to reveal the guts inside. 

“Oh what, and now you’re going to fix it with a refiner repair kit and some extra reemium wire?” 

Han’s head snaps up. “You have reemium wire?”

She’s about to remind him that she didn’t come here to play mechanic’s assistant, but something lights up in her memory, and Leia sits up, grabbing for the pack that was initially hers before Winter took it. “There’s a reemium core in the ore separator,” she says, “and the refiner screen in Deev’s pack has a field maintenance kit.” Tarric had been insistent that all the equipment come with maintenance supplies: it wouldn’t be any good to them if it conked out six weeks in with no spare parts. She’d had to send down to the equipment maintenance techs for reams and reams of documentation on climate resistance, temperature resistance…

Han’s eyebrows shoot up, and he levels an appraising look at the various bits of equipment she’s pulling out of the bag. “What about a transmitter?”

Leia frowns down at the pack. “In the deferritizer, maybe? I remember Tarric’s head mechanic was worried about it; he made us wrap it in special foil…” She bites down the spike of guilt for somehow letting that slip through the cracks in their mission briefings and gropes through the pack until her fingers close around the familiar crinkly texture. 

Han rolls his eyes. “Would it kill you official types to tell me these things in advance?” But he’s giving her the kind of impressed look he usually reserves for himself, and grabs a screwdriver to take off the case. 

Leia tries to remind herself that this is the man who once jimmied the Falcon’s coolant system back into operation with three of her hairpins and a set of mismatched wingnuts. “Can you fix it?” 

“Don’t worry, Princess.” He winks, and she tries to ignore the effort it takes to keep her expression appropriately unimpressed. “I got it.” 

**

[Imperial security station, 12 hours later.]

Security Chief Dran Halston dismisses the pair of shock troopers and tries to ignore the cold trickle of failure in his gut. To have Leia Organa trapped, and then let her slip the net…

He flips on the recording of the Rebels entering the tunnel: Organa making small talk with the Underground operatives, her bodyguard tugging her back with obviously more than security-minded concern.

Intelligence has identified the man as Han Solo, disgraced Academy graduate and quasi-rehabilitated spice smuggler – surely even ex-royalty wouldn’t sink to…

But he has no other explanation, especially not one that would account for the fragmentary but unmistakable recording of her pushing him against a wall to shield him from a concussion blast. He drums his fingers on the desk, and instructs the computer to call up any other recordings where they both appear. If he can convince his superiors that Organa has a psychological weakness, there’s the slightest change that he’ll be able to squirm his way out of this one with his career intact, and from this clip together with some earlier recordings from Nal Shaddar, the evidence is reasonably promising…


End file.
